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When I spoke to Arsenio Hall—whose cool, raucous late-night show, “The Arsenio Hall Show,” I watched at my mother’s hip all through its six-season run, fantasizing about joining him as a guest on its famous couch—he’d just returned to Los Angeles after a gig. About thirty years after the end of “Arsenio” ’s prime, Hall, now energetically seventy, is still a diligent stand-up comic, doing dates alongside an early show-biz buddy, Jay Leno. The guys hit a Foxwoods, get some laughs, and skip back home. Sounds like fun.

The whole groundbreaking point of “The Arsenio Hall Show” was that it marked the emergence of a younger, less white crowd in the provinces of late night. Hall’s musical guests trended hip-hop—Tupac Shakur, the Wu-Tang Clan, and LL Cool J all garnered important exposure on the show. It was a stark difference from the vibe on the set of, say, “Johnny Carson.” But, in reality, Hall was always an old-school performer whose like is, these days, quickly vanishing from the scene. Carson happened to be the great hero of his childhood. Hall was raised in large part by a single mother—who, perhaps prophesying her son’s eventual vocation in Hollywood, was named Annie Hall. His father, much older than his mom, was a preacher who wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. Instead, Hall put on late-night shows in the basement of his home and became a popular child magician, earning money by doing his routine at ritzy parties and travelling to magic conventions.

In his new memoir, “Arsenio”—reviewed in this magazine by my colleague Jennifer Wilson—Hall shares a life-changing moment. At one of those conventions, an older practitioner named Hank Moorehouse pulled him to the side and shared an observation: the teen-age Hall was a great magician, but the best part of his routine was the jokes. Between tricks, he issued a barrage of sly asides at the audience:

“You did this card trick,” Hank Moorehouse says. “You told this lady, ‘Blow on the cards, and I’ll say the magic words.’ What did you say next?”

I said, “I know all the white magicians say abracadabra. I say collard greens.”

“The audience went crazy,” Hank Moorehouse says.

Later, a fire at Hall’s grandmother’s house would destroy most of his magic act. But Moorehouse proved prescient: Hall followed his advice all the way to Hollywood. “Arsenio” tells that story—with “The Arsenio Hall Show” as its dizzying, occasionally harrowing zenith—with Hall’s characteristic good cheer. Whether he’s starting up a friendship with his hero Richard Pryor or making an eventual classic movie—“Coming to America”—with his pal Eddie Murphy, Hall is always stopping to notice and marvel at his blessed luck.

He did the same when we talked. Wearing a baseball cap and a permanent smile, Hall reminisced about Pryor, Murphy, the temptations of show biz, his unique and sometimes lonely role as a Black celebrity, and what it’s like to be a “laughter addict.” Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Where are you getting off the plane from?

Me and Leno, on weekends, would pop out and do this thing called “Kings of Late Night.” We did a year of it, and there were still more dates that C.A.A. kept coming to us with—so me and Jay just kept going out, and this weekend it was Foxwoods and Niagara Falls. We go in there, and I come out and I offend people, and then Jay comes out and makes them feel better.

That sounds like the general rhythm of a friendship.

Me and Conan O’Brien were joking about it. I said, “You know, we all have fought with Jay. Me and Jay—I’m like a little brother. We’re like Cain and Abel without the killing.”

What made you decide it was time to write a book?

I’ve always wanted to do a book. But I remember doing “Harlem Nights,” and I walked on the set, and I said to Eddie [Murphy], “How is it?” Because this is an actor who’s directing, and he’s never directed before. And he turned to me and he said, “This is adult work.” He said, “This is the adult part of filmmaking, dog—all the decisions, all the actors. I got Redd Foxx in that trailer, and Richard Pryor in that trailer, and I’m waiting for the sun to get right for the scene, and I’m here earlier than anyone.” And I was proud of him, and laughing at him at the same time.

Well, that’s what the book is like next to standup and golf. There is nothing harder than writing a book. There were days that when I was writing the book I wished I was directing Redd Foxx. First of all, I had to talk to my mother more than I like to—you know, some of your secrets . . . “Mom, what’s that dude’s name that used to sell weed when we lived above McKinney’s Superette?” You know?

You’ve been in show business your whole life, starting as a young magician. Do you sometimes feel that you spent your whole life onstage?

I’m kind of a Walmart Michael Jackson. It’s like nothing of that level and grandeur. But, as a child, when I was hearing about this Black band from Indiana, and they were on the Miss Black America pageant—at that time, I’m doing bar mitzvahs as a magician and winning talent contests in Cleveland and working downtown at a magic shop and at Cedar Point Amusement Park, in Sandusky. And then my house burns down. But I remember, while that was going on, I’m in show business, too, in my mind.

I’m at school, in my junior year, sitting after you play ball—you know, sitting on the floor, with your back against the bleachers—and I’m talking to Steve Harvey, who was one of my guys at Kent State, up until our junior year, and I tell him about the fire, like, “I thought I was gonna be a magician, man. But that’s God telling me no, you know?” And Steve is, like, “Yo, I thought we was gonna do comedy, dog?” We knew that’s what we wanted to do. Until the fire, I was, like, Well, I’m gonna be a funny magician. Steve had some personal issues and dropped out, and I lost track of him. And years later he resurfaces on “Showtime at the Apollo,” and I’m, like, Oh, that’s my guy from Cleveland.

With my life, sometimes it can seem like I’m making it up. Sometimes it sounds crazy, but I think it’s because I’m where I’m supposed to be. It shows you, one, that dreams do come true, and, two, that you can dream and talk your way into where you need to be. I think we all know who we are from early ages and people talk it out of us. But I’ve been in this frame of mind to be who I am for a long, long time.

You talk about watching your father preach, being a magician, turning to comedy. What did you learn in those young years?

Well, a moment ago you heard me have an exchange with Ms. Sloan, who’s a publicist. When you’re in the ghetto of Cleveland, you don’t even know what that means—I never heard the word “publicist.” But, at the same time, I made these flyers: “Arsenio, the magician who makes the impossible possible—bar mitzvahs, weddings, birthday parties.” And I sent these flyers to flower shops and Gingiss tux rentals. I was my own publicist. I was my own manager, even though I didn’t know what those words meant. I’m a kid who discovered the business through the need for things versus an education in Hollywood.

I was making money from my paper route and doing magic, and then I took my mother on her birthday to see Al Green. And Al Green has a comedian opening for him. As a magician, I had big boxes and doves—live doves. But this dude walked onstage before Al Green with a glass of juice, and he had a towel on the stool. And I’m, like, post-fire, That’s my calling. Because I love the sound of laughter. And when I watch my dad in the early parts of a sermon on a Sunday morning make people laugh about the events of the day and what’s in the news—you know, it’s a quick moment, but you say, “That’s what I’m going to do next. I don’t have to carry a lot of stuff. All I need is a towel and a glass of juice.”

As a kid, you’re kind of a little entrepreneur. And yet you also talk in the book about how you’re—not a recluse, and not an introvert, but an on-your-own kind of dude.

“Recluse” always sounds like the crazy guy, right? Probably has a lot of cats? I don’t want to sound crazy to people, but I’m an only child who used to do impressions and sing in the mirror holding my mother’s perfume bottle to simulate a microphone. I did a talk show in my basement. What Black child in the 44105 of Ohio has kids from the neighborhood gather, put out folding chairs, put a needle on a record to play, walk out and do a magic trick and a joke, and then interview Junior from down the street? And I’m doing it all alone. I have no brothers and sisters.

And I still am a guy who’s very comfortable being alone. I love people, but, when I drop that mike, I kind of go back to Arsenio from Cleveland, who goes out the back door—go home and stream “Yellowstone” with my woman. I met a woman twenty years ago and we became friends first, and she’s so much like me it’s not healthy. The two of us together, we could end up nailing the door shut from the inside and just have Grubhub passed through a slot. We love each other’s company.

What did you learn, early in your career, from opening for music acts? Dionne Warwick, the Temptations, Patti LaBelle?

Those guys taught me the road and taught me show business.

You tell this great story about one night going out to play blackjack with Patti LaBelle, and she gives you her wad of cash and says, “Look, I’m only spending the amount I have. Don’t give me this money back.” Then she tries to get the money from you. And it’s a funny story about you guys becoming friends, but it also struck me as a story about the drawbacks of the road, or the vices that can slip in, and how you have to learn how to protect yourself. Because there’s loneliness, and all kinds of temptation and distraction. Was there ever anything that made you say, “I don’t want to do that?”

I wasn’t perfect. I remember, I’m on the road with Lou Rawls, and some girl says, “Have you ever tried coke?” And you realize that you haven’t, but if you do it’s a shortcut to having a strong rap.

I don’t want to fast-forward us too much, but you had phases of when you kind of turn into the partier a little bit. How did you learn to temper that, especially as somebody who’s growing in fame and influence and exposure?

Everything that I am and that I’ve grown to be has been because of God’s blessings and protection. And sometimes that can come in the form of God sending you friends at the right time. I tell the story about having a hangover after a crazy party. And Marla Kell Brown—everybody has a producer. I happen to have a producer who was also a friend, who would say, “Jackie Collins is on today, and you haven’t read her book. And I’m going to give you the pertinent parts of it.” And I’m lying on Joan Rivers’s bed in the dressing room, which she used to have for her dog, Spike. So when she left the “Late Show,” I inherited that dressing room and that bed, and I’m lying on that bed with a blistering headache, and Marla’s telling me about Jackie Collins’s book. And then after the show that night we have a talk, and she’s, like, “If you want to win, there is no audible that you can call at the line for a hangover.” I said, “You know, I get it, because I was playing hard and if you want to win hard sometimes you can’t play hard.” So I had to change.

Marla was my friend, along with being my producer, and she’s, like, “If you want to take you to another level, you’re going to have to find that balance.” I’m a cold-turkey kind of dude. As a matter of fact, I even started being the ambassador for DARE and going to classrooms, and that kept me right, because I know you can’t mess up, because now these kids have their eye on you. I became the national ambassador for DARE, working day and night on my career in a very serious, disciplined way. I flipped the switch.

I love this part of the book where, after you’ve done your bit filling in after Joan Rivers’s show gets cancelled, you go away to make “Coming to America,” and you’ve got enough money, finally, to buy a condo—but you don’t have enough money to put anything in it. And you invite over to your place somebody who you’re becoming friends with, Richard Pryor. He says, “I remember when I bought my first place. A lot like this. That’s back when I was happy. Life was simple. Then everything changed.”

I hope, if anyone young touches my book, I hope I can just get that across to him. Because Richard told me that problem, and it didn’t sink in—I still had to go through it, and on the other side say, “Yeah, that’s what Richard was talking about.” I still had to be in a place overlooking the ocean, with two guest houses and fifty acres—about forty-eight more than I needed. It was nice during the pandemic. But I kind of forgot what Richard told me, because it’s very impressive to bring a lady to a compound. But at a certain point, when you turn fifty, you’re, like, “Hey, why am I doing all this work? Why do I have all these people? I have a staff, right?” And you just want to simplify your life, and you remember Richard’s voice.

Very few of us know what it feels like to go out on a stage, as you said, with a stool and maybe a water or whatever, and make people laugh. All through this book, what’s pulsing is your love of this thing. What has it always felt like to you?

You are either a laughter addict or you’re not. We both have friends who you could give them some Ecstasy, and they could say, O.K., I get it, and never touch it again, no matter how good it is. But then there are other people who are, like, Yo, can you give me more of that Molly stuff? And that’s what laughter was for me.

I just came home the other night from Foxwoods, and my woman says to me, “There are a lot of March Madness games on. We should stay home and just watch games.” And I pause, and she looks at me. She says, “You don’t have to go to a comedy club.” I didn’t even say nothing. But she knew you just came home from Foxwoods and you need to pop in to fucking Flappers to do ten minutes, because I’m an addict to that laughter. Well, let’s go get a pizza, and I can make the man who sells us the pizza laugh, but I gotta hear a laugh today.

A lot of times, much of a Hollywood memoir is someone saying this person screwed me over, this bad thing happened, and so on. But so much of the book is not like that. A lot of it is, “And then I met Joan Rivers, and then all these wonderful things happened.” How did it feel to be the guy with the hot hand?

I said to Richard once, “I can’t believe so many incredible things are happening to me. I can’t believe this is my life.” And Richard would say, “You know, thank the powers, but stop worrying about it. You’re gonna spend your time wondering why? Enjoy that shit!”

It seemed like one long blessing, and every time I hit a wall God installed a window. When I would spend that last bit of money that my dad left me, I would get a call that Quincy Jones had snuck into the Roxy and watched me and wanted to talk to me. “Can you call him at the studio? Here’s the number.” Quincy don’t know that I’m one rent check away from having to go back to Cleveland. And he gets me a gig as a voice-over guy.

When you and Eddie made “Coming to America,” what was the feeling on set? Did you know that you had a hit?

Oh, no. As a matter of fact, I remember looking at Eddie’s mom one day and thinking, She doesn’t look like she likes this, you know? We’re winging ad-libs on certain takes. “His mama name him Clay, Imma call him Clay.” There is no Black person that I can say that to, and they won’t know what I’m talking about, right? And I’m talking a thirty-year-old Black person, who will say to you, “My parents made us watch ‘Coming to America’ as a family once a year.” But you don’t know it in that moment.

Your emergence tracks with the emergence of a whole new group of young Black entertainers—a moment that changed the face of the entertainment world, even to today. Obviously, your show is a great expression of this. But did it feel like something was changing across Hollywood at the time?

I felt that, but I didn’t see it as us. I felt we were the beginning of this wave that happened from us idolizing the people before us. When I’m young, I’m looking at “Soul Train,” and there’s no A.I., there’s no search. You’re just looking at credits on a Saturday morning saying, “So Don Cornelius is the creator and producer, he owns his shit.” And I think we’re building dreams on the back of these people. Richard Pryor puts his standup not in an HBO special but in the movie theatre, and what you’re seeing is the business model changing, like we see the streamer changing things now.

We were watching, learning, and dreaming. I remember Eddie calling me and saying, “I went to lunch with Marlon Brando,” and I was, like, “I went to lunch and listened to some tracks with Quincy.” And these were our heroes, and we were learning from them. “Here, can we ask a question we’re going to ask you?” Me and Eddie went to [Sammy Davis, Jr.,’s] house together one night, and after a movie we asked him question after question after question, because that was our A.I.

It was Quincy Jones who told you that you needed to write your own theme song?

He sent me a Casio keyboard with a little drum machine in it. I made a lot of money from that Casio.

We talk now a lot about artists owning their own work, and that was something you were thinking about in 1990. Are there opportunities that you wish you’d been able to grab, along those lines, that you see people taking advantage of now?

I wish I had said no more. Because I’m watching musicians not own their masters and end up broke, and I watched Redd Foxx have to sell things when times got hard. Like [Sylvester] Stallone—the story in Hollywood is that Stallone wrote the first “Rocky” and he was, like, If you want it, I gotta be Rocky. Sometimes you gotta know when to fight and when to pass and roll over.

I’m going to take this deal from Paramount for the talk show, because nothing from nothing leaves nothing. I’d rather bet on my numbers and an escalating scale—my business manager, Mark Landesman, designed this escalating scale where my numbers go up, my dollars go up. The show was good, and I won, because I bet on myself.

Let’s talk about that time. You’ve had some, as we call them, reps, finishing off the Joan Rivers show after it ended. Of course, you had been preparing for this since you were a child, in your basement. But the portrait in the book is of somebody who really knows what he wants, from the beginning. Is that right? It’s 1989 when it starts, the first season of the show. Was it more anxiety than confidence? Was it fear?

There’s this bittersweet reality when you realize that Johnny [Carson] likes me because I’m not trying to be him. I don’t even want his guests, right? I heard that from Ed McMahon at a dinner. “Johnny loves that you’re doing your thing.” I want to do a show that’s the show that didn’t exist when I was coming up. I want to do a show—we didn’t have the term then, but I want to do a show for the culture. I want the huddled masses to have a show.

At the same time, the reason Johnny likes me is also the reason I can never achieve the numbers that Johnny achieves. I know booking Q-Tip is not gonna move the needle the way a Johnny guest could move the needle—a Jane Fonda. But I know who I am and why I’m doing this show and what I dreamed up in the basement.

I remember calling Paramount, saying, “I just talked to a friend of mine, Michael Bivins. He’s in this group called New Edition, and Mike is starting to produce young groups, and he found these four dudes in Philly called Boyz II Men. And they don’t have an album yet, but I heard a tape, and they’re really good, and they idolize the Temptations, as I do. So I want to bring the Temptations on, and I want them to do numbers with this new group.” And on the stage is a Paramount executive’s nightmare—it’s, like, three hundred Black people doing choreography.

Dancing and singing and carrying on.

And that show is not gonna make me the sweetheart of American late night. And sometimes I was so stubborn, because they would tell me to balance it more, but that’s the show that didn’t exist when I was coming up. I came up and you’d have to wait a month, and they’d say, “I think Ray Charles might be on the ‘Tonight Show’ this week.” I brought an audience. It’s not a big enough audience to become Johnny, but I brought the audience to the TV that didn’t watch, and that’s what ended up being my saving grace and my glory.

And it does seem like there were conversations that happened on your show that wouldn’t have happened anywhere else. You tell the story of Magic Johnson, your friend calling you to tell you not only that he’s contracted H.I.V. but that he wants to talk about it on your show.

Or Tupac saying, “Hey, they saying I did something to some girl.” We didn’t have Twitter, but I was Black Twitter. If Tupac were alive now, he might lay on his back like Mike Epps, talking to his phone about his problem. Back then, you called me, and I’ll put you on TV and you can tell your side of the story. I used Tupac’s name because twice Tupac called. Another time, he called me and said, “I’m about to do this movie ‘Poetic Justice,’ and they want me to take an AIDS test. And if me and Janet [Jackson] gonna really get it on I’ll take an AIDS test. But just for the fucking movie?”

“What am I doing this for?”

Yeah. And so I was Black Twitter. And with Magic I was, like, “Yo, dude, don’t you want to go do this on ‘Larry King’ or something?” I’m not a journalist. I’m an infotainment comic, you know? And he was, like, “No, God, I gotta go where I’m comfortable, and I gotta reach the people I need to reach.” Not to mention, he had just told me. I was brokenhearted and afraid—well, that, I can’t do it justice. But he was, like, “I don’t need a journalist. I need a friend.”

You knew how to get a laugh—you’d known how to do that your whole life. How did you learn how to interview people?

I just mentioned Larry King. I did a lunch with Larry King, and he didn’t turn out to be the man I thought every white dude was. I’m expecting him to say, Well, I have a journalism degree from Brown or Yale, right? And he said something to me. He says, “I’m just curious.” So I tried to be a comic who’s curious, which means I’m always going to try to ask, instead of traditional questions that late-night hosts have always asked their guests. I would try to look at fan mail. Or anybody who engaged me in a mall—sometimes they’d say, “Have you ever wondered why?” And I wanted to ask the questions my fans wanted me to ask, and just be curious, and break up the normal fare.

There must have been moments when that felt especially heavy, though. I mean, O.K., you’re not a classically trained journalist, but here you have a guy, Bill Clinton, who wants to be the President of the United States, and, yeah, he’s gonna play the saxophone, but also are you feeling a lot of pressure in that moment? Having a part to play in a national election?

It’s weird, for starters. I mean, watching television, I always thought you have to try to balance the conversation. If you invite a Democrat, you’re supposed to invite a Republican. I thought that’s what I was supposed to do, give equal time. As a result of that mentality, I remember inviting [George H. W.] Bush, who, you know, in pretty harsh terms, said, no.

“No, thanks, Arsenio. I don’t have a saxophone to play.”

Yeah, they didn’t like the show. I think Bill was around [George] Stephanopoulos and Hillary, and they thought it was a great idea. They even did MTV after they did me, because they were, like, I think we’re on to something. Let’s go after this young demo that’s out there looking for something.

I always felt like we have journalists. We have everybody from Bryant Gumbel in the morning to people like Oprah. My job was a little different. It was to be a little closer to the fan watching. What do they want to know? Because, in my heart, in my mind, I know Oprah don’t listen to hip-hop, so I am closer to the fan than the journalist is. I want to know stuff that the fan wants to know.

When you deal with Clinton, or with [Louis] Farrakhan—I remember looking at fan mail and talking to people. What do people want to know in the Black community? We want to know something different than Mike Wallace wants to know. And people whisper. It’s, like, Did he have something to do with the death of Malcolm? People didn’t even want to say it out loud. And I’m, like, Let me ask the questions the culture wants to know. And that’s how I did every show—closer to a dude named Tyrone in Detroit than Johnny in Hollywood.

I know it did create all kinds of stresses and pressures—you talk about them in the book. Nobody else would have had Farrakhan even asking to be on the show. And, on the other hand, you have the N.A.A.C.P. saying you don’t hire enough Black writers, etc. You talk about Spike Lee calling you an Uncle Tom. I was in bed reading and I literally gasped, because I didn’t know that, and I was thinking, There’s nothing that a Black man could say to me worse than calling me a Tom. It’s the worst thing. And so to be put in a position where you’re not Black enough over here, you’re too Black over here—it just sounds lonely.

Man, oh, yeah. That’s why people like Sammy and Don Cornelius were so important to me, because there was almost no one you could go to for advice. I remember Jay Leno saying to me, “No, I never had the Italian or Irish community come to me and say, ‘You’re not doing enough.’ ” They had no idea what I was going through. I know it’s not politically correct to talk about Bill Cosby these days, but this is a guy that would sit with a cigar for four hours in a dressing room after a show and talk to young comics. I knew a dude opening for Bill Cosby, and when he got off, and I got off, I would run over there, and I could just get over there in time before Bill walked on, hoping that Bill has some time so I can say hello. And not only does he have time but it’s, “How are you, young man?” And take you in this dressing room and talk business and show business for four hours. And there is no school like sitting with Sammy or Bill.

One of the most touching parts of the book is an older Sammy Davis, Jr., who, you know, he’s had his troubles—his infamous hug with Nixon got him kind of shunned in the Black community. And he comes to you and does a song, even though he’s old and sick, and he says, “I don’t want it to seem like I didn’t do something for you that I would have done for Johnny Carson.”

Sammy and Cosby, they always got it, because, on some level, they had experienced it. Torn between money and fame, and that other side of what the Black community expects of you and wants you to do, and how to walk that tightrope of “Pull up your pants and don’t sag” but yet not be called an Uncle Tom. It’s a tough balance being Black and famous, dog, and it’s some other shit. I joke about Johnny Witherspoon. You’re looking for some advice about show business? Johnny Witherspoon’s advice was “Stay away from the white women.” You can’t help who you love. One of the greatest gifts in my life is walking in any room with my woman of twenty years, who is melanated, because that’s one battle you don’t have to fight.

It seems like a minefield, and yet you love the job. And you tell the six-year arc of the show like almost a symmetrical thing, where it’s going up for three, and then there’s a way down for three. At the top of that roller-coaster ride, were you imagining that you would be doing some version of that show forever?

Oh, I knew it wasn’t. It’s so hard when you’re succeeding to let off the gas, but I also knew I’m not the guy. I didn’t come to Hollywood to do one thing, and the one thing I love about my life is the diversity of it. Because I’m talking to you as an author, which is a word I had to learn how to say so I wouldn’t sound like I’m talking about this dude, my neighbor, named Arthur. So I’ve learned even to say the word, and I’ve become it. I’ve done standup at Carnegie Hall. I’ve won a reality show with a guy who later became President. I knew I wasn’t supposed to come to Hollywood to do one thing, but I knew what my launching pad was supposed to be, because I had practiced since the basement in Cleveland. I knew this life had been built on dreams, and my dream was not to do this one thing—especially after the “Coming to America” experience. I sat in the back of a theatre and listened to people laugh at me. And when you hear people laugh at you, you’re, like, I’m going to do different things, but they’re all going to be to entertain.

There’s a part of the book where you’re kind of facing the music—your initial executive on the show has left, and you’re getting all these notes of, you know, “It’s too Black.” And in the midst of that period an activist stands up in the middle of one of your tapings and asks, “Why don’t you have enough gay representation on the show?” And, in your mind, you’re, like, Well, a lot of my friends who you know—Rosie O’Donnell, Ellen DeGeneres—are gay, and you wouldn’t know that they are, because they’re not out. And the funny line in the book is “What do you expect me to say? Put your hands together for that well-known balladeer and homosexual, Luther Vandross?” I wonder if you ever look back and wish there were more things that you could have talked about. If the show were today, you could have maybe talked to Luther about his life in a way that he wasn’t able to talk about it then.

You don’t have to hide it as much these days. And I wish he had lived in this world a little bit, so he could be himself and still sing. It’s so hard to be in a trap of that nature. And so many people back then were in a trap. It’s, like, if Rosie came on and did jokes about her love life, they weren’t going to be honest jokes. And there’s nothing funnier than real shit, right? There’s nothing funnier than being honest. So many key people in this book were gay people in the closet, and so many people back then were doing bits based on what people wanted to hear, not who they really were.

What is the thing that you feel like you haven’t done that you want to do?

I don’t know specifically, but I know there’ll be laughter involved. I watch the business, how it morphs and evolves. One day, you see Jeffrey Katzenberg come up with something for the phone, and you say, Oh, that might be the future. And then that doesn’t work. But you see what Ted Sarandos does that works. It’s almost like when you watch little Black girls as a kid do double Dutch, two girls with the rope at each end, and you see somebody standing, getting their timing right, and then they jump in at the right time to get in between the ropes. That’s what show business is. I watch show-business ropes, and look for a place, realistically, for a seventy-year-old to jump in. I don’t jump like I used to. But the bottom line is I love to act, and I love to make people laugh. And I’m looking for that father role. I’m looking for that next thing that I can be a part of in this ever-changing world of streamers. I saw a kid watching “Coming to America” on his phone, and it almost made me faint, because you give your greatest performance, and now people are watching on the phone, and nobody’s going to the theatres. So what you have to do as an O.G. is accept all the changes and figure out a way to work within the new parameters and watch somebody watch your art on a phone. ♦

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Cassandra Neyenesch reads her story “Enough for Now,” from the April 6, 2026, issue of the magazine. Neyenesch is a Brooklyn-based writer and curator who has published nonfiction in the Guardian, Public Books, and Art in America, among other places. Her début novel, “A Little Bit Bad,” will be published in May.

The pleasing part of an airport is its frictionlessness. The experienced traveller might make it from taxi to gate in a tight twenty-five, passed from station to station as seamlessly as an electron in a circuit. The place is in the hands of the security state, but the touch is generally light and the thanking is relentless—for your patronage, for having your I.D. ready, for your participation at the silver level in the airline-rewards program that, financially, keeps everything afloat. An airport offers, if not exactly an equitable experience (there are Clear lines, lounge archipelagos), then at least a perceptible simulacrum of equality, in that everyone rides the same people movers past the same Cinnabons. Certain European airports still project a mid-century grandeur. The domestic versions don’t ever really manage that, but on good days they can convey a spirit of efficiency, graced with free pretzels and Wi-Fi.

This whole apparatus came shuddering to a stop last week in a pretty spectacular and ominous way, as thousands of T.S.A. agents, who were unpaid because of a budget impasse over how to fund the Department of Homeland Security, had stopped showing up to work. Americans were experiencing, the T.S.A.’s acting administrator told the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday, “the highest wait times in T.S.A. history.” By Thursday morning, people were arriving for their flights six or seven hours early, so that LaGuardia was packed at 3 a.m., and by 9 a.m. at J.F.K. the security lines stretched out to the curb. (“There was no water, no food. It was horrible. That’s not human,” a traveller in Houston told the Times.) That evening, President Donald Trump, perhaps eager to declare a victory somewhere, announced on Truth Social that he would issue “an Order” to pay the agents. The Senate then passed (by voice vote, at 2 a.m.) a bill that restored D.H.S. funding—but not for ICE or Customs and Border Protection—and left town for recess. On Friday, the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, tersely rejected the bill, calling it a joke. Trump’s order, a Presidential memorandum, soon appeared, instructing D.H.S. to use existing funds to pay T.S.A. workers—a decision he could have made at any point.

The road to the very long lines began in February, when Congress, in resolving a broader government shutdown (the second in four months, impressively), could not agree on how to keep funding Homeland Security. As of Friday, T.S.A. agents—who turn out to be the essential element in the frictionless airport experience—had not been paid for about six weeks. They make in the neighborhood of fifty thousand dollars a year, and bills do not stop just because paychecks do. There were some gothic stories (a union leader reported that some members were selling their blood plasma for cash), and nearly five hundred agents quit, but many more simply called in sick: more than a third of the workforce in Houston, Atlanta, and New Orleans was absent on a single day. Spring break loomed, then the summer travel season, this year punctuated by the World Cup. Testily, the Senate Majority Leader, John Thune, said, “This is a pox on everybody’s house.”

When someone in Washington tells you that everyone is suffering from the political pressure equally, that’s often a sign that he, specifically, is feeling it the most. The present mess has roots in two entangled, defining White House projects. The first was DOGE, which congressional Republicans hoped would, among other goals, ease the nation’s deficit, but which succeeded only in dismantling vital programs and antagonizing federal workers (who do things like making sure that no one is carrying liquid explosives onto planes). The second was the mind-bending expansion of ICE—last year, Congress separately approved seventy-five billion dollars for the agency, effectively almost tripling its budget—which has colonized virtually every sector of Trump’s domestic agenda.

Congress’s February efforts to resolve the shutdown were complicated by the lawless ICE campaign in Minneapolis, where federal agents killed two American citizens during a brutal crackdown on protests. As a condition of agreeing to fund D.H.S., congressional Democrats demanded certain reforms: no masked ICE agents, no roving sweeps, no arrests in churches or schools. But the White House and its allies refused, even though ICE’s methods of immigration enforcement are increasingly unpopular and few new migrants are coming into the country. By the end of last week, the Democrats had not won any reforms to ICE, though the episode provided a very public demonstration of how much dysfunction Trump and the G.O.P. are creating in the agency’s name.

The deeper trouble for Trump is that he has not offered the public much else in his second term. His Administration took office convinced that it had a mandate for big changes, but with few substantive ideas about what those changes should be. The tariff program has petered out and DOGE is done. The President is distrusted on the economy and has, per Fox News, a disapproval rating of an astonishing fifty-nine per cent. Since the campaign, Trump has remained relentlessly focussed on immigration enforcement.

So it was predictable that his response to the delays at the airports was to send ICE agents. They didn’t help much with wait times; it takes four to six months to properly train a T.S.A. agent in screening protocol. In Philadelphia, a union official told the Inquirer that the ICE agents (who were being paid, while T.S.A. employees were not) stood by the windows and did “nothing.” In a concession, they did not wear masks. Just before the deployment, there was an ugly scene at San Francisco International Airport after agents carried away a passenger, originally from Guatemala, who was waiting to board a domestic flight with her daughter. ICE agents are involved with so many different federal activities that it can be hard to understand the evolving scope of their role. Are the violent, militarized, Minneapolis-style sweeps that so enthused the President a few months ago now a thing of the past, as some Administration officials have suggested, and as Trump himself seemed to be signalling when he fired the D.H.S. Secretary, Kristi Noem, and replaced her with Senator Markwayne Mullin? If so, what is such a large and extravagantly funded force meant to do?

Some of the degradations of the government that Trump has overseen are hard to illustrate in real time, but any local-news cameraman can shoot a long line of bored and frustrated people. The addition of ICE agents into the frame made for an elegant encapsulation of the political situation. The President has, in ICE, a quasi-authoritarian force at his disposal. But the trains are very much not running on time. ♦

In your story “Enough for Now,” a young American woman and a Dutch man meet while backpacking around China in 1994. You were a student in China in the early nineties. Does the story draw on your own memories?

I studied for a year at Nankai University, in Tianjin. The first novel I wrote was about that year, but it had no plot, and I lost it on a first-generation iMac that died. “Enough for Now” draws more on the backpacking I did during the breaks and in the summer after my program ended, some of the most blissful experiences of my life. China then felt like it was in another century, just beginning to industrialize on a mass scale, and every day was a feast of beautiful and fascinating things. Many people had never talked to a Westerner before. It was also often annoying, and I saw sides of myself that I didn’t like. But the thing that I loved most about backpacking was that I was living as close as I’d ever been to a pure state of existence, almost egoless. No future or past. When you travel like that, no one knows you or cares about who you were before. Maybe that’s why it makes the story’s protagonist, Martha, so angry that the Chinese people she meets focus on the fact that she’s an American, even though they do so with respect.

The story begins on a train, somewhat subverts the typical strangers-on-a-train narrative in which a chance encounter leads to a love story (that is, the Linklater version rather than the Hitchcock one). It’s clear from the get-go that your two characters, Martha and Joost, are not embarking on a sentimental romance. Did you know how their connection would pan out when you started writing?

I’m interested in the provisional relationships people form in temporary circumstances, when everything gets very reduced and primal and, at the same time, becomes more free. If either person wants to leave, they can just leave, though it can actually still be quite hard to do so. I like that emotion—the tug of caring about someone you might not normally spend a lot of time with, or maybe don’t fully respect. You share these few weeks (which, when you’re backpacking, feel like years) and form a kind of marriage of convenience, moving through space together, and somehow you can’t help but love each other a little. The movie “Sirāt” (which was nominated for two Oscars this year), about a group of techno ravers going on an odyssey through Morocco, captured some of that feeling. The intensity of the experience makes it so that you can’t help but care about the people who are going through it with you.

Martha and Joost have been backpacking solo in China for months. The story never really tells us why they’ve both chosen to do this. Do you have an idea? And is there something about China in those years that made it, for you, the perfect setting for this story?

They’re travelling solo because they want freedom. For her, it’s more the freedom of not dealing with other people, except on her own terms; of not having to be someone; of being simply a phenomenological intelligence taking in the wonders of the world, “a big naked eyeball.” As soon as you’re in a relationship with another person, you take on an identity; you’re solidified into a certain role. The conflict for Martha, though, is that after being alone for so long she sometimes feels that she’s getting “weird”—i.e., detached and a bit inhuman.

For Joost, it’s the freedom to do whatever he wants and follow his own whims, before he goes back to Holland to start what he knows will be a conventional life. Joost’s backstory—in my mind, not on the page—is that this is his big walkabout before he goes back to Leiden to finish his accounting degree. I decided not to talk too much about the practical aspects of their lives—how they saved up the money to travel, what they plan to do for a living afterward—because I think it’s the one thing that Martha and Joost would not discuss. Those are parallel existences that neither is particularly excited to return to.

Martha had a confidence-shattering experience with her previous boyfriend. And she is horrified when she discovers that Joost may also not be the person she has assumed he is. She views the sexual obsessions of the men she knows as a form of culturally induced P.T.S.D. Do you agree with her?

I think that’s for men to say. Martha is just interpreting what her boyfriend (and the artist they talk about) are telling her, using an analogy she can relate to from her own experience. In other words, I am interpreting what men have told me.

You wait until almost the end of the story to tell us some fairly crucial information about the traumas in Martha’s past. Why did you want to hold off until then?

I generally follow the rule of “information as needed”—where it fits in the flow of the story. Martha hasn’t been thinking about the trauma, which relates to her last and only serious boyfriend, because there’s no pretense between her and Joost that this is going to be a relationship that lasts beyond the weeks they travel together. It’s provisional in its nature. But, when she finds out that her ex and Joost have this thing in common, then it stirs the pot. All her disappointment comes back.

This is your first story in The New Yorker, and your début novel, “A Little Bit Bad,” will be published in May. You’ve been writing reviews and cultural pieces for thirty years. When did you start writing fiction, too?

I have a fairy-tale publishing story! For three decades, from age twenty-five on, I wrote fiction without publishing a single word. There was always a feeling that it wasn’t good enough, plus it was so hard to do the selling part, so painful to keep getting rejected. But I still wrote every day because I loved it so much.

After my time in China and, later, living in Taiwan, I wanted to write about the cultural and personal baggage that people bring to their interactions and how that limits our ability to connect, but how sometimes we manage to break out of our programming and connect anyway. I didn’t want to be looking at Chinese and Taiwanese people through an exoticizing lens; I wanted to explore the space where people meet. “Enough for Now” means a lot to me because it’s a return to that unfinished project. I worked on it for—possibly?—twenty years.

In fiction, I follow E. M. Forster’s motto: “Only connect!” It’s a basic human struggle to figure out how to love instead of fear each other, whether that happens between lovers, or between people from two countries with very different cultures that are supposed to be rivals—at least, according to some greedy people at the top, who benefit from global gamesmanship, to put it politely. How do we get past all these silly ideas about one another and just understand that we’re all human? ♦

Martha noticed the Dutch backpacker, of course. He was sitting next to her for eight hours, in the hard sleeper from Xi’an to Guilin. She could tell he was Dutch from his accent in Mandarin—like blurry German. He was engaged in a battle of courtesy with some policemen over a brand of cigarettes called Long Life.

“Long Life!” the police would say every hour or so, holding out the pack and shaking it at him.

“Long Life,” the backpacker would reply with a chuckle, and wave a hand in front of his face to say, No, thank you.

Long Life cigarettes smelled like early death and bitter, frustrated dreams. At twenty-five cents a pack, they were considered a medium-status brand, still a splurge for most people in China. (The perfect cigarettes for bribing a low-level law-enforcement officer, for example.) Foreigners might have smoked them just to be cool and ironic, if they weren’t so awful.

The backpacker’s refusal seemed to hurt the policemen’s feelings, and they would raise the stakes with each offer, nagging, scolding, and, by the fifth time, practically shouting, “Long Life! LONG LIFE!” The backpacker, not understanding that cigarettes were the main currency in an elaborate networking system, and that he was essentially rejecting their offer of friendship, looked more and more confused.

Martha watched all of this unfold from the flip-down seat by the window next to the Dutchman’s lower bunk. (She had the top bunk.) She was enjoying the whole scene and, especially, the policemen’s outfits. They looked like members of the Village People, with their giant aviator sunglasses and tight khaki uniforms tucked into high-heeled black boots. Between them sat a peasant with matted hair and a padded coat over his shoulders. From time to time, as the policemen were yelling “Long Life!” at the backpacker, one of them would stick a cigarette in the peasant’s mouth and light it, as if to demonstrate what civilized men did.

When the train stopped for three hours outside Guiyang, the backpacker finally admitted defeat and accepted a cigarette. That seemed to break the ice.

Where were the foreigners headed? one of the policemen asked, crossing his booted legs and dragging on his cigarette. “Oh, Guilin! Wonderful city!”

The other policeman quoted a Tang Dynasty poem: The river winds, a green silk ribbon . . .

The first policeman, using the plural “you,” suggested that they try stuffed river snails, a famous Guilin delicacy.

The Dutch backpacker, possibly not knowing how to say that he and Martha were not together, gave her a sidelong look.

Martha clarified, “I’m also going to Guilin, but we don’t know each other.”

“You don’t know each other?” The police were astonished. What were the odds? Two foreigners in the same bunk! And they even looked alike.

Martha and the Dutch boy glanced at each other again and blushed. Visually speaking, they were the same sort of white person, both sallow and long-nosed, with that ashy color of hair that is neither blond nor brown. He had a beardless, pretty, androgynous face that reminded Martha of a member of a New Wave band. But he wore a red bandanna around his head, like a Canadian Waldorf-school teacher.

Martha had already discounted the possibility of anything sexual happening between them, partly because of the bandanna. But who was she to judge? She was wearing an embroidered Uyghur men’s hat. Mostly she’d stopped believing in sex. Not that she didn’t want it, just that she no longer thought it could happen for her here.

The community of backpackers moving through the Chinese hostels had the values of a slutty, hippie utopia. They came from everywhere, mingling and flowing past one another like water molecules in a sea, swirling back at the uncrossable borders with Myanmar and Tibet, scattered by the slightest impulse. Certainly a person could get laid while adrift in this restless tide, but only in a “We’re all free spirits, no commitments here, hey, namaste, you look like you need a back rub” kind of way that really didn’t do it for Martha. As for Chinese men, they were either too shy or much too cocky, wanting to show off their high-school English with her.

After six months of backpacking, Martha was feeling very Taoist, very detached, just a big naked eyeball wandering around, absorbing all the astonishing things there were to see at the frayed edges of a defunct feudal empire. A person who was naturally solitary could become even more molded by solitude, to the point that she was afraid to let anyone take it away from her. She could not keep having interactions, real interactions involving sentences; she just wanted to eat a bowl of noodles and go on her way. She wasn’t interested in other foreigners, period, and she was definitely not here to speak English, which she already knew. If she felt that she was getting weird, she would attach herself to a group of backpackers at one of those cafés that catered to their longings for coffee, bread, and other exotic specialties. But foreigners were expensive; they kept playing cards and ordering smoothies and french fries and “pizza,” and she would feel her remaining money draining away as if it were her life force.

Cartoon by Roz Chast

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She turned back to her book, “Gunnar’s Daughter,” a slender Norwegian novel about date rape in the Viking world. Every conversation ended in a stabbing. So far, Martha was cautiously intrigued, but it was impossible to concentrate. Long Life cigarette smoke was making her nauseated and hungry, and she had nothing to eat but some oily fried beans she couldn’t stand to look at anymore. “The East Is Red” and other patriotic songs played maddeningly in an endless loop on the scratchy sound system, and, just when she thought she would spontaneously combust, the train stopped in a town called Flower-something and idled there long enough for people on the platform to thrust Styrofoam lozenges of food through the windows at the passengers and for the passengers to thrust money back at them. In the transition that occurred—the shift in the quality of the silence between Martha and the Dutch boy as they inspected the contents of their lunch lozenges (chicken?) and rubbed their chopsticks together to remove the splinters—he asked, “What are you reading?”

With a game-show flourish, Martha indicated the legend beneath the author’s name, “Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.”

“Eh . . . must be pretty good then?”

Martha laughed. “Gunnar’s Daughter” was exactly the sort of harrowing, realist “good” novel that washed up on hostel bookshelves. She theorized that backpackers liked them because the miserable lives of the characters made the agony of a hard sleeper car seem relatively endurable. Being on the top bunk of three tended to make you ponder the deeper questions of existence—the patriotic songs wailing a foot from your ear, food and water and toilet so far away down a long ladder. And yet your sufferings would come to an end in a mere fifty-seven hours, or whenever the train disgorged you, while the sufferings of Gunnar’s daughter would probably end only with her death.

“I think it’s because the Chinese censors don’t allow Western novels into the country unless they’re depressing,” the Dutch boy said.

“Because they make our society look bad?” Martha said, devastated, knowing that he was probably right. Another theory deflated.

The Dutch boy’s name was Joost. As the train made the long approach to Guilin, he and Martha scooched closer and talked in lowered voices while the policemen rearranged the peasant’s jacket over his shoulders and gave him sips of tea from a jelly jar. Hours and hours of rolling green hills and rice paddies passed by the windows, the pale pools amid the shoots flashing bits of sky.

No one would talk to them about anything real, they agreed. They didn’t blame people for being cautious—they understood that it wasn’t safe. The Tiananmen Square massacre had been only five years before.

What Chinese people did like to talk about, a lot, was the price of goods and services in the U.S.A., which they called Beautiful Country. A ten-speed bicycle, for example, what did it cost in Beautiful Country? A car? A washing machine? It was a delicious shock for them to hear how expensive things were in Beautiful Country. It seemed to imply that people had the money to buy those wonderful things. They all wanted to immigrate to Beautiful Country, every single person Martha met. If she warned them about the inequality and racism in Beautiful Country, they would say, “Oh, right, your social problems, uh-huh, we heard about those. What about a refrigerator? What does a refrigerator cost?”

Beautiful Country was definitely winning the twentieth century. That was clear to everyone at this point. “America! No. 1!” people would tell Martha, giving her a thumbs-up. Why, though? they seemed to be asking her. How had a callow upstart nation on the edge of nowhere become No. 1, the baby, the favorite child of history? What had Great China done to become so unloved by fate?

Joost said that he got it worse. Holland, mm-hmm, tulips, windmills. But have you been to Beautiful Country?

Stupid Beautiful Country.

The police were feeding anise-flavored watermelon seeds to the peasant, who cracked them expertly between his teeth and spat the shells onto the floor. Martha was transfixed by a realization: the peasant’s hands were cuffed behind his back. She hadn’t noticed before, with his coat draped over his shoulders. He was a prisoner the police were transporting, possibly a fugitive. So many impossible things happened in China every day that it hadn’t struck her as odd that the policemen were treating him like a big, scruffy baby.

Martha told Joost about a boy who had followed her from the youth hostel in Beijing, asking her the usual questions: Where you come from? How you like China? He was gaunt and brutally handsome, with a face like a cube someone had punched to make features, and had the general nerviness of a guy who had got up that morning planning to approach a Western girl. Martha, bored, had tried an experiment. When the boy had asked her how much she’d spent on her Nikes, she’d asked him if he thought there would ever be free speech in China. She wasn’t a total idiot—she’d waited until there was no one else around to overhear them as they had turned onto one of those endless Beijing streets that is just a series of compound gates. She imagined that, here, they would finally break through this barrier of silence between them and commune deeply about things that affected them as humans.

But the boy had become impatient and sullen, his hands shoved in the pockets of his jacket. “I don’t want to talk about history,” he’d said. “I’m tired of history. Nobody wants to talk about it.”

Martha had suddenly understood that she was being naïve, American, a huge asshole. She should have known this. She’d taken so much Chinese history in college she felt like she’d almost lived through the Cultural Revolution. Wars, famines, purges—why don’t we let the teen-agers kill all the professionals? That sounds like a good idea. And just when they’d started to have a bit of hope for something else, the tanks had come and mowed it all down again. If she didn’t understand that, she couldn’t understand him at all. Fuck history. The price of sneakers was his problem. “I WANT TO TALK ABOUT BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY!”

It was like a whole relationship that Martha didn’t want to have, in forty-five minutes. She felt terrible, but she needed to get away from him as fast as possible. She ran into the Forbidden City, where she knew he couldn’t afford the entry fee, and stared at dusty rooms behind smudged plexiglass for two hours.

And he waited.

As the train pulled into the precincts of Guilin, Martha and Joost gazed out the window at a series of pointy green hills poking up out of bright-orange soil.

“Would you like to split a double room at the hostel?” he said. “I have this durian. For once, I would like to eat the whole thing.”

He opened his pack and pulled out a durian the size of a dinosaur egg, covered in woody thorns. Then he pulled out a machete.

Wait, Martha thought. Is this a sex thing?

On the other hand, it made sense—wanting a private room in order to eat a durian. They were notoriously stinky fruits; you could never cut one open in a dorm situation.

Later, in their double at the hostel, Joost hacked at the durian over a copy of People’s Daily. The flesh looked like a human brain and smelled like rotten hamburger meat wrapped in gym socks wrapped in butt. Martha sat on the other bed and thought about what a perverse species humans were—to insist on eating something that had tried so hard to be inedible.

That night, Joost wanted to dine at a real restaurant like rich foreigners. “Come on, it’s so cheap!” he said. They shared an appetizer and two vegetable dishes, and he had a meat dish, plus beer. Joost spoke in a soft, amused tone, prefacing his sentences with, “Eh . . . yeah?,” his head always cocked, in Martha’s imagination, if not in reality. He was likable and easygoing—she kept thinking the word “amiable”—but there was something he was holding back. He was almost too polite.

They talked about the fugitive and the police on the train, wondering what the man had done, if he was a murderer, and feeling that the policemen in go-go boots had been very sweet with him, almost tender. It was as if the Chinese instinct for nurturing through creature comforts was stronger than whatever made the police the police.

After a few days of this—sleeping in the same room, eating all their meals together, not having sex—it felt as though they were practically married. Still, it was awkward between them, this unanswered question: Sex?

On the third night, Joost stopped being polite. Over dinner, he made fun of her for being a pescatarian, then ordered rabbit, snake, stuffed river snails—the cutest or most disgusting things on the menu—just to annoy her. She was annoyed and called him a dick. He seemed to take that as encouragement and got another round of Five Star beers.

On the way back to the hostel, Martha drunkenly confessed that she’d had a fantasy about the fugitive. The train had crashed and she and the fugitive had survived, and he had told her a super dramatic and horrible story about his life—he was a dissident on the run—and they had fallen in love. Then they’d had to steal food while evading the authorities, either escaping to Vietnam, or else coming to a tearful reckoning that they could never be together and parting ways.

“Keep your eyes on Mike—he’s said to be flirting with the concept of integrity.”

Cartoon by Mort Gerberg

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She and Joost were walking along the Lijiang river watching a woman paddle a market raft. Fog wrapped the bottom of the cone-shaped hills and a wet breeze blew off the water. Martha was shivering. She’d never shared that particular dark corner of her mind with a boy before—the Harlequin Romance part.

“Here,” Joost said, unwinding his Cambodian scarf to give to her. It smelled of him, earthy in a surprisingly clean and herbal way, like chamomile tea. “So it’s true,” he said. “You really think life is a movie, you Americans?”

The playful way he said this made her laugh. “As if you don’t have fantasies.”

“Not silly ones like that.”

Back in the room, Joost initiated some tussling, some tickling, and was, as it turned out, extremely good at oral sex. Then he pretended that he was the fugitive and it was their first time. It was fun; Martha had not done sexual role-play since she was nine or ten, with other girls. Her last and only boyfriend, Tim, would have been too inhibited.

“I never liked cunnilingus before,” she said, all aglow with post-orgasmic triumph.

“Maybe that’s because you call it cunnilingus.”

“What do you call it?”

“Eh, yeah . . . we have a verb.”

He said a word she couldn’t pronounce right no matter how hard she tried. Beffen? The Dutch were apparently very particular about their unaspirated “B”s.

They spent the next week wandering Guilin and the outlying towns that backpackers liked, talking in a stream-of-consciousness way. Martha learned Joost’s entire history: his bipolar mother, his absent father, his battles with depression. He’d grown up in a commune, raised by three women with fairy-tale names—Agatha, Leneke, and Ineke—so the bandanna, she thought, was forgivable. Martha complained about her evil stepmother, who thought she was literally allergic to the planet and had made Martha’s father move to the Sonoran Desert to live in a geodesic dome. And Martha wasn’t even allowed to visit because of “contamination risk.”

It all emerged in this altered state; nothing had more weight than anything else. Sex bound them together as long as they were together, the swimming warmth of the double bed, skin and limbs and hair. It’s enough for now, Martha thought.

It was unlike her and made her feel a little distanced from herself—not in a bad way, maybe. She loved not having to sleep in a dorm, and she loved beffen, and Joost recited an existential Dutch poem to her:

Why squirrel?
Because in a tree he.

In Yangshuo, they fell in with some kids from Tel Aviv, who were sitting in a café playing whist (a card game that oddly existed only in Jane Austen novels and among groups of Israeli backpackers), and Martha wondered, Do they think we’re boyfriend-girlfriend?, and caught Joost’s eye. He didn’t seem to care. Maybe the pretense was comforting to him, too. The illusion of having a person who was your anchor to the world as it spun around you.

Sometimes Martha would look at Joost over dinner, her chopsticks poised in her hand, and think, After a week from now, I will never, ever see this person again, and then wait to see how she felt. A bit psychotic, actually.

“Shenme?” Joost would say in Mandarin. “What?”

She would reply, “This fish-flavored fish is pretty good to eat!” and give him a thumbs-up.

It was as if he were an experiment in not caring and, at the same time, in fucking. As if she were exploring the exact balance between having sex and giving a shit, like in an essay for one of her women’s-studies classes: Explore the relationship/causality between being in love and achieving sexual satisfaction with someone. Are these necessarily direct values? Could it be argued that in some sense every sex act is a fleeting pantomime of love?

From Yangshuo, they went to Guangzhou, where they both knew, although they didn’t talk about it much, that they would part ways. A backpacker never changed course for someone else. That was the only rule. On their first night in Guangzhou, while Joost was in the private shower attached to their room, Martha pulled her money pouch from the recesses of her pack and counted her traveller’s checks. She had four hundred dollars left, barely enough to get her to Taiwan. Joost planned to swing up the east coast to Shanghai, Hangzhou—places she’d seen already.

She didn’t want to go back to Beautiful Country. She wanted to keep being a giant eyeball. She’d decided to try Taipei, where, people said, you could easily earn twenty dollars an hour teaching English.

She sat for a while, not really thinking about that. Joost’s journal, bound in moss-green cloth, lay on the bedside table.

Something Martha admired about Joost, besides his unflappable amiability in the face of annoying situations, was the diligence with which he kept his journal, which he wrote in every morning as he drank his tea. She had a journal but wrote in it only sporadically, mostly to vent about her fights with street venders.

By now, at the end of their second week together, she’d begun to suspect that, one, Joost was secretly a romantic dude, and, two, he was some kind of aspiring writer, and, three, he unconsciously wanted her to read his journal.

He was almost dramatically evasive about the content of his entries—were they diaristic, observational, lyrical?—but he mentioned the journal often, making fun of himself for lugging around the six notebooks he’d already filled in, and saying that he wrote mostly in English because his favorite writers were Henry Miller and the Beat poets.

Also, he left it around.

The shower was still running—he was very clean. Martha picked up the journal and opened it to the first page.

In small, meticulous print, Joost described watching a girl in a miniskirt biking along the road, and how he was going to push her off her bike and pound her good with his big, hard cock and make her squeal like the whore pig she was. Martha turned the pages, finding more fantasies of Joost accosting girls in public places and humiliating them sexually, like Henry Miller but worse. It was at least, maybe, not racist, as some of the girls were white. She flipped through, looking for her name. Was she hoping not to find herself, or did a perverse part of her want to? Clashing forms of disgust made her feel something like motion sickness, and she dropped the book. She was shutting down, spiralling. She had to get out of the room—luckily, she hadn’t unpacked yet. She grabbed her backpack and left the hostel.

She hurried to the main road, convinced that Joost was a serial killer and was following her. She ducked into the first side street, walking with no direction through an area of small apartment buildings, then through a street of restaurants with bright signs, alleys of tiny, ancient houses. She had an excellent internal map, and she loved to go nowhere, knowing that she was well enough oriented to find her way back. Usually, it soothed her, drifting quickly, absorbing the details of the world, the cat-sitting-in-a-window of it all, the way she could look and not belong. Now everything seemed fake, a setting made of cardboard.

Were all men sexually gross? Why was everything so gross? Was that what it meant to be an adult, that you just accepted that everything was gross?

The thing is, another part of her brain chimed in, I didn’t know that the last time we had sex was going to be the last time. And that’s just kind of not fair.

Martha didn’t want to be a prude. She and Joost were nothing to each other long-term. Did she really have to care that he had rapey fantasies? Couldn’t she just sleep with him in a comfortable bed a few more times, eat, drink beer, and forget that she’d read that?

Night fell, and Martha came to a small black lake. From the shore, she could hear a brass band playing somewhere. The notes bounced over the lapping water, and people’s voices came in fragments. It was one of those transient moments she lived for: something overwhelming about life seized her, and she experienced a kind of stunned bliss. But her back hurt from her lumpy pack, and she suddenly understood that there were people out there, groups of people who belonged together, families, friends, lovers, that she could hear but not see in this magical darkness by a lake. She was alone again. That was the trade-off for giving up her solitude—how she felt her aloneness when the other person was gone. If she walked into the lake and let her backpack drag her under and drown her, no one would care.

Here was the thing: Joost was good at sex, for someone who said he’d had only one girlfriend and few hookups—attentive, patient, persistent. With Tim, Martha hadn’t often come during intercourse. She hadn’t come much, really. She hadn’t come at all. She had never once come while having intercourse with Tim. It hadn’t seemed important. She’d felt like she might come. She was so in love; he smelled like a person and also like a freshly baked croissant. He was her total feminist dreamboat, a guy who, upon waking up to find all his clothes dirty, would be perfectly willing to wear some of her clothing to go to brunch. A boy who loved to dance, who let his curly hair grow wild, who never in his life called anyone bro, who was a music major with a minor in art history. More than this, or in spite of this, Tim was clever and silly. They had, as LL Cool J said, a lot of private jokes to share.

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And then, after four years together, Tim had dumped her, with the words “I’m sorry. I just really need to fuck someone else.”

It happened at the Art Institute of Chicago. They were looking at collages by the artist Keiichi Tanaami in which some highly sexualized images of big-breasted women repeated horribly, like flashbacks. Martha was reading that Tanaami, a survivor of the Second World War, had been meditating on violence when he made these works. If repeated images of sexy women somehow equated to violence, she wondered aloud, what did that say about the male imagination? Were men traumatized by their own penises?

In a way, Tim replied, his sexual thoughts were as relentless as that. Like he didn’t really control them; he wasn’t driving the thing.

“Wow,” Martha said, with a feeling of everything clicking into place. “You’re describing P.T.S.D.”

When she was nine, she had been in a car accident that had killed her mother. Splinters of memory still punctured reality when she was driving on the highway, and she would feel a compulsion to crash. That was how it sounded to her to be besieged by graphic sexual imagery at all times—so unrelenting, so unstoppable (because if you tried to repress it, it only got worse) that you might as well let the fantasies pass through you, the same way she occasionally noticed a racist thought in her mind and went, Well, that’s not good, but now that I’ve noticed it I can let it go. Or something like that?

Tim said, “Yeah, pretty much.” Then he looked serious. “Since you brought it up . . .”

Over the course of the next, endless day, Tim talked to her so candidly about his need to fuck other women and how he never thought about a single other thing that later, in the alone period after the dumping, Martha felt completely desexed. She was not a woman; she was barely human. She had transformed from being someone Tim wanted to fuck, and therefore lied to about his other desires, into an erotic nonentity to whom he could tell the truth.

She passed a lit-up restaurant, and there inside was Joost, drinking beer with some French backpackers they’d met before. With a rush of sick relief, she went in and sat down with them. She and Joost pretended that nothing had happened, drank Five Star beer, and laughed with the French people, but when they got back to the room, she said casually, “Do you hate women? I’m just wondering.”

“You read my journal.” Joost looked stricken but in a fake way, as if he’d thought about what his reaction should be. “You shouldn’t have done that. It’s a violation of my privacy.”

Martha had guessed that he would say something like this and realized how completely she didn’t care.

“We’re about to go our separate ways, so if I’m an untrustworthy person, you don’t have to worry about that ever again.” Martha’s father, a law professor, had trained her to be a rational, step-by-step arguer. Let the court stipulate: I don’t care about invading your privacy and nothing you say will make me feel guilty about doing it. “But I am concerned that you write about raping people every day.”

Joost seemed to accept this. He was not an arguer at all. He sat down on the bed and said that he didn’t mean it, he just loved Henry Miller, so he pretended to be Henry Miller in his journal.

Martha sat down next to him. “But Henry Miller is terrible. He is, like, the worst writer.”

“I’ve always wished I could be a cool guy like him, though. Like a guy who has sex with lots of girls. But I never wrote that way about you.”

Now Martha was filled with a strange emotion she’d never experienced before, a tender, maternal pity. She felt such sorrow for the state of this man that she wanted to cradle him in her arms like Mary with the body of Jesus. She wanted to make a Pietà scene with Joost, emotionally, and hold him for a long time.

Another part of her knew that she absolutely did not want that. The whole reason she’d had sex with him in the first place was because it was temporary, and her stupid bimbo body couldn’t brainwash her into thinking that she loved him.

Martha and Joost said goodbye in the train station at the eastern end of Guangzhou, on the edge of China. He promised to write to her poste restante in Taipei, and Martha thought, Yeah, that’s not going to happen. They hugged for almost a minute, during which all she could feel was that this was the last time anyone was going to touch her for months, maybe years. She inhaled his chamomile musk and, horribly, tears sprang to her eyes. She really loved that existential poem about a squirrel.

She was the first to break away, turning and climbing onto the train without a word. From her seat, she watched him walk away, a hand on each strap of his technical European backpack, his feet splayed in well-worn Birkenstocks.

So that was that.

A woman with a teen-age daughter and glasses like a pair of headlights stared at Martha hungrily from the facing seat, as if she wanted to ask what a college education cost in America. As “The East Is Red” cranked up on the P.A. system, Martha bent over her pack and rummaged for “Gunnar’s Daughter,” the bloody Viking novel. Her torso had the strafed, torn-up feeling she usually got when she was fighting with a vender. She hoped that the ambitious-looking woman in the opposite seat would not try to speak English with her. ♦

One cold morning in 1980, when I was not yet four years old, my mother woke me while it was still dark, pressing her face against my cheek. “We have to leave,” she whispered. “Right away.” I rolled off my mattress, pulled on some clothes, and followed her down five flights of stairs without a word, carrying my sneakers and walking on tiptoe so I didn’t wake the neighbors. Outside, my father was already chipping ice from the windshield of our rusted station wagon.

My mom stood in the doorway. Her hair, which she had kept short and dyed red, as part of a disguise, was starting to grow out, straight and dark down to her shoulders. She stood still, cradling my baby brother, but her eyes kept flickering to the Harlem intersection, following each car that passed. Finally, my dad whistled twice, our usual signal—one short, one long—and she led me into the back seat. My dad glanced behind us once to see if we were being followed, winked at me in the rearview mirror, and then swung our car toward Interstate 80, headed west.

My memories of this time are hazy, of course. I remember them the way anyone “remembers” the important moments of their childhood—overlaid with family lore, stories my parents told, and details I’ve reconstructed from recent conversations. But underneath it all there are real sense memories. Among my earliest, maybe imprinted by the fear of that night: the cold smell of the city, and the fuzzy disorientation of waking up while it was still dark out. I remember wondering why we were leaving, and what was going to happen to us next.

A decade earlier, my mother, Bernardine Dohrn, had declared war on the United States government. She and my father, Bill Ayers, helped found the militant revolutionary group the Weather Underground, and committed themselves to opposing the Vietnam War and fighting back violently against what they saw as a fascist police state here at home. They and their friends set off bombs at the N.Y.P.D. headquarters, the Capitol, the State Department, and the Pentagon. They wore disguises, lived under fake names, built a network of safe houses, and became the focus of an international manhunt. In 1970, the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover called my mom “the most dangerous woman in America.” That October, she became only the fourth woman in history on the F.B.I.’s “Ten Most Wanted” list.

I was born underground and spent my early years on the run. By 1980, though, my parents had finally decided to turn themselves in. A plea deal awaited us in Chicago, but, for the deal to work, we had to make it to the courthouse in person. If we were caught along the way, my mom would spend decades in prison. It was a tense drive that night; my dad says that he kept our station wagon well below the speed limit.

The next morning, we pulled into a rest-stop Burger King. While my mom stayed in the car to nurse the baby, my father and I went inside, and a nice elderly couple started talking to me in line, just making conversation. “Hey, sweetheart,” the man said, smiling down at me. I had shoulder-length blond hair at the time, and people always assumed I was a girl. “You all on vacation?”

I knew I wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, but my dad was busy ordering our food, and I felt like I had to say something. My response has, in the years since, become a running joke in my family.

“We’re going to Chicago,” I told them, “so my mom can turn herself in to the F.B.I.”

My dad turned, surprised, trying to catch up. “Oh. Yeah, I don’t know,” he said, trying to force a laugh. “Maybe something he saw on TV? Hey, Z, you need to use the bathroom before we go? Say bye.”

I waved. And, before we got our food, he picked me up and ran for our car. As he peeled back out onto the highway, he told my mom that he thought somebody had recognized him. He was trying to protect me, I think. My dad knew that I was desperate not to disappoint my mother—that I wouldn’t want to admit I had broken the underground’s strict codes of secrecy. I looked up to her. I admired her. I wanted to be like her.

Of course, as I got older, that got more complicated. My parents’ brand of violent resistance, I now know, had tragic consequences for our family, and deadly costs for the people around us. Three of my parents’ closest friends were killed in an accidental dynamite explosion as they planned an attack on a U.S. Army base. Others spent decades behind bars, leaving their children without mothers or fathers. And years later, when the group splintered into increasingly militant factions, some took part in a disastrous bank robbery that killed an innocent guard and two police officers—three men who were just doing their jobs that day, and who left behind their own kids, their own families.

Of course, I didn’t know any of this at the time. I just remember watching my mom’s face in the rearview mirror, wondering what she was thinking—whether she was also scared—as she scanned the maps in our faded Rand McNally road atlas. In our family, my father was usually the one driving, but there was never any doubt who was setting our direction.

“Get off at the next exit,” she ordered him. “We’ll switch to local roads.”

My mother wasn’t always a revolutionary. She grew up a middle-class white girl in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin. Her dad was the credit manager for a local chain of appliance stores, a second-generation Jewish immigrant, and a lifelong Republican. My mom seemed, at first, eager to please; she was a straight-A student, and, at seventeen, became the first person in the family to go to college, at the University of Chicago, where she soon went on to law school as one of only a handful of coeds in her first-year class.

But letting your daughter see more of the world than you did means that she might come to see that world quite differently. In 1966, Martin Luther King, Jr., came to Chicago to lead a series of protests against racism and housing discrimination. “Seeing King, night after night, speaking in churches,” my mom told me recently, “it changed my life.” The civil-rights movement needed lawyers—ideally people willing to work for free—and she soon signed up to volunteer. “I knew nothing,” she said, laughing. “Second-year law student. I had an armband that said ‘Legal.’ It was ridiculous!”

In 1968, my mother was in New York when she heard screams coming from the street outside. Dr. King had just been killed in Memphis, Tennessee. My mom grabbed her purse and got on a subway to Forty-second Street. “I don’t know why I did,” she told me. “But, by the time I got there, there were thousands and thousands of people in Times Square. I wanted to be in a crowd of people who were mourning. And angry. Both.”

That rage drove her away from King’s politics of nonviolence and toward a more militant ideology. She was soon elected to the national leadership of Students for a Democratic Society, the largest student protest group in the country at that time. It was through S.D.S. that she met my dad, the son of a prominent utilities C.E.O. He had grown up in a wealthy suburb of Chicago, burned his draft card at the University of Michigan, and then dropped out of school to protest full time.

Then, in 1969, my mother split S.D.S. in half, forming a more radical faction of the group called Weatherman. (The name was taken from the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: “You don’t need a weatherman / To know which way the wind blows.”) That October, Weathermen rampaged through Chicago’s upscale shopping district—the Magnificent Mile—with bricks, chains, and baseball bats, breaking windows, smashing cars, and brawling with armed police officers: the so-called Days of Rage riots. Their statement following the protest gave the title to Paul Thomas Anderson’s recent film about modern American revolutionaries:

FROM HERE ON IT’S ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER—WITH WHITE YOUTH JOINING IN THE FIGHT AND TAKING THE NECESSARY RISKS. PIG AMERIKA BEWARE. THERE’S AN ARMY GROWING IN YOUR GUTS AND IT’S GOING TO BRING YOU DOWN.

My mother had found a new, more revolutionary role model to follow—Fred Hampton, the charismatic twenty-one-year-old chairman of the Chicago Black Panthers. They became friends and comrades. The Weathermen and Panthers held meetings together and exchanged intel about government surveillance and police informants. It seemed for a moment that they might help realize Hampton’s dream of an interracial “rainbow coalition” of radical activist groups.

But, two months later, Hampton was also dead, executed by Chicago police while he slept in his bed with his pregnant girlfriend beside him. An F.B.I. informant had spiked Fred’s Kool-Aid with a sedative so he wouldn’t wake up during the deadly late-night raid. This new killing drove my mother and her friends over the edge. “I was in a rage,” she told me, still visibly furious decades later, “at the absolute stench of American life.”

The next night, Weathermen placed plastic coffee cups filled with black powder under the hoods of police squad cars across Chicago. The explosion wrecked the cruisers and blew out the windows of nearby buildings. A few months later, my mom and dad, along with roughly a hundred other members of the group, changed their names, cut ties with their families, and disappeared.

On May 21, 1970, an audiotape was delivered to newspapers across the country on behalf of their newly renamed group, the Weather Underground. “Hello, this is Bernardine Dohrn,” the recording begins. “I’m going to read a declaration of a state of war.” Two weeks later, a dynamite bomb exploded on the second floor of the N.Y.P.D. headquarters. President Richard Nixon immediately called an emergency Oval Office meeting. “Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans—mostly under thirty—are determined to destroy our society,” he told his intelligence chiefs. “I do not intend to sit idly by while self-appointed revolutionaries commit acts of terrorism throughout the land.”

When I was still a kid, driving with my parents across the country, I think I imagined that the underground was a physical place, as if it might have its own two-page spread in the road atlas mapping a hidden archipelago of safe houses, communes, and meetup spots—a whole secret subterranean geography. But it wasn’t a place, really; my father used to say that it was just a state of mind. “I went underground by changing my name,” he told me. “One day I was one thing, and the next day I was another.”

Finding a new name was surprisingly easy. A Weatherman would drive out to a rural graveyard and look around until he found the headstone of a person who would have been about his age but had died as an infant. Then he’d head over to the county courthouse and ask for a replacement birth certificate. Soon, he would have an official government license with his photo, but a new name and a whole new identity.

My dad grew his beard out. My mom cut her hair short, dyed it red, and started dressing like a California hippie—big glasses and flowing dresses—rather than in her signature black leather, miniskirts, and knee-high boots. They set up safe houses—cheap apartments in working-class neighborhoods. They took jobs as construction workers, longshoremen, and nannies—work that didn’t require a Social Security card and always paid at the end of the day, in cash.

Meanwhile, their bombing campaign intensified. In July, a bomb shook a U.S. Army base near the Golden Gate Bridge. The next day, an explosion shattered the glass-and-marble lobby of the Bank of America building in New York. The method they used was simple: a young white woman dressed up as a secretary would walk into a building, place a bag or a purse in an empty rest room or office, set a timer, and walk out. A few hours later, someone would call in a warning. Minutes after that, the bomb would explode.

The warning calls mostly prevented serious casualties. After an accidental explosion in a West Village bomb factory killed three Weathermen, those who survived, shaken by their friends’ deaths, swore off deadly violence. But the attacks, though meant to be symbolic, were still dangerous—and reckless. And, although Weathermen today still insist that they were not terrorists—that their bombs were intended not to maim or kill but to send a message—the fact is that setting off bombs carries an implicit threat of violence. It can terrorize people. And while there may be moments in history when some of us would concede the necessity of illegal, violent resistance—Nazi Germany, say, or the South under chattel slavery—dynamite is a self-defeating tool in a democracy, however imperfect. Blowing up buildings doesn’t help build a mass movement or create momentum for lasting change.

But, if the goal was to draw attention, the Weather Underground’s bombing campaign was a huge success. It turned my mother into a symbol—a heroic anti-government outlaw to some, a violent, un-American terrorist to many more. Actors and rock stars from the counterculture scene—including the band Jefferson Airplane—started donating money and cars to the cause. Alt-weeklies reprinted my mother’s mug shot with the message “Bernardine Dohrn welcome here!” Teen-agers hung the page in their windows or on their walls, like today’s dorm-room posters of Che Guevara or Malcolm X or Tupac—less a sign of a specific political ideology than an impressionistic display of youthful rebellion.

That September, my parents were contacted by a cult of weed and LSD dealers in California with the incredible name the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, who wanted help breaking their hero, Timothy Leary, out of prison. Leary, a Harvard psychologist turned acid guru, had become famous for urging young people to use LSD to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” He had been sentenced to twenty years behind bars for possession of two joints—an early test case in the government’s “war on drugs”—and the members of the Brotherhood were determined to free him. In exchange for a paper bag full of cash—twenty thousand dollars in unmarked bills—the Weather Underground agreed to do the job.

They came up with a plan. Using blueprints smuggled in by a radical lawyer representing both Leary and my mother, they gave Leary instructions on how to climb, hand over hand, along a telephone wire for more than two hundred feet across the prison campus, in the middle of the night. Once over the concrete wall, he dropped down to a patch of grass, where a group of Weathermen were waiting in a van, dressed to look like a family on a fishing trip. They quickly dyed Leary’s hair, gave him new clothes and a passport, and spirited him out of the country—but not before he and my parents celebrated together in a forest clearing, smoking a joint and listening to Jimi Hendrix. “It was fun,” my mom remembers. “I mean, we’re standing there in a redwood grove in California, and there’s all these headlines about him being gone.”

As the decade wore on, though, my parents grew up—as happens to young rebels—and my mother, unexpectedly, started thinking about having kids. “Maybe it was turning thirty,” she told me. “I was so adamant until that moment. I was really sure—that wasn’t going to be me. And suddenly it was me. I don’t know how to explain it.” She found out she was pregnant from a free clinic in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. Home pregnancy tests were not yet widely available, so she had to risk showing up at the clinic in person, then calling for the results a few days later. The nurse on the line sounded apologetic as she broke the news; most unmarried women were apparently eager for a negative result. “I’m really sorry to tell you this,” she said. “But you’re pregnant.” My mother, though, was ecstatic. “Ahhh!” she shouted into the phone. “That’s so wonderful!”

My parents rented a scruffy one-bedroom apartment overlooking a park in the Fillmore District. They bought bags of thrifted baby clothes and decorated the apartment with cheap wall hangings and stuffed toys. “We’d been safe for a long time,” she told me, when I asked whether she considered the dangers of having a child while she was a fugitive. “I felt that we knew how to be safe.” They found a midwife through trusted friends. And I was born at home, in the spring of 1977, in a safe house, underground.

Bernardine Dohrn and Zayd Ayers Dohrn, disguised as Rose and Z, on a family road trip.Photograph courtesy the author

My parents never lied to me about any of this—except maybe by omission. My mom says she tried to explain it to me so a four-year-old could understand. We were part of a rebel alliance, like Luke Skywalker or Princess Leia, fighting an evil empire. We were outlaws, like the animated fox from Disney’s “Robin Hood,” stealing from the rich to give to the poor. So I knew, from my earliest memories, that my parents had broken the law, and that the F.B.I. was chasing us. But I don’t think I ever understood exactly who—or what—“F.B.I.” was. Why did F.B.I. want to catch us? What would happen if it did? I had no way to imagine a federal agency. To me, it just felt like a scary presence pursuing our family all the time—a childhood bogeyman.

According to my parents, by the time I was three I had learned to recognize plainclothes cops and F.B.I. agents in a crowd. You had to look at their shoes (cheap leather loafers, well shined) and their cars (American-made, stripped-down, but with souped-up radio antennas and the telltale rumble of an upgraded V-8). They taught me never to use landlines that could be traced—we carried rolls of dimes in our pockets and made our calls from pay phones. I learned to speak in code. “Brown shoes” meant undercover agents. Living on the run was being “in on the joke.”

When I was four, I learned to walk a “trajectory,” the complicated mix of turns and switchbacks we used to lose a tail. Up the stairs onto the elevated tracks, wait two minutes, double back again, through the park, across the basketball courts, around the corner. It was a bit like playing a game—a grownup version of dress-up or hide-and-seek, but only my family knew all the rules. At every place we stopped for more than a week or two, my parents got new jobs, dyed their hair strange colors, spoke in new accents, and took on unfamiliar names. My mom went by Louise (Lou) Douglas, Rose Brown, Lorraine Anne Jellins, H. T. Smith, Sharon Louise Naylor, and Karen Lois DeBelius. My dad became Joe Brown, Tony Lee, Jules Michael Taylor, Hank Anderson, and Michael Joseph Rafferty, Jr. I wanted to be part of their grownup world. So, even though no one knew my real name anyway, and I wouldn’t have a birth certificate until I was five, around strangers they started calling me Z.

It all seemed strangely normal. Pretty much everyone I knew back then was a fugitive. And, over the years, I met other kids whose parents were also on the run—“Panther cubs” and “Weather kids” like me, with no school and no regular place to call home. Jad Joseph, whose father, Jamal, was an underground member of the New York Black Panthers, remembers his dad telling their family to get ready for a car trip, and snapping, “If you’re thirty seconds late, someone could die!” Jad told me, “I was just, like, ‘Dad, no one’s gonna die because we’re late to Grandma’s.’ ”

Other friends remember being toted around as “beards” when their parents were out scouting bombing runs. The idea was that a couple with a kid in tow wouldn’t look too suspicious taking a walk near a police station or an Army base. My friend Thai, whose parents were part of the Weather Underground leadership, remembers his father, Jeff Jones, coming home one day to find their family’s Hoboken apartment surrounded by cops—a fire inspector had spotted his tiny crop of marijuana plants on the fire escape. Jeff picked Thai up at preschool that afternoon, and their family never went home. They abandoned everything they owned overnight—medical records, books, baby pictures, toys.

My family spent time at communes in Oregon, where I played with other kids in a waterfall we called “the washing machine” and learned to milk the cow (named, naturally, Emma Goldmilk). We stayed in trailer parks in Virginia and flophouses in the slums of Detroit. But I noticed, leafing through the road atlas, that we never visited the tourist sites the guide suggested: Disneyland, the Hoover Dam, the Alamo. On the rare occasions we took time to sightsee in my family, it was to visit monuments to injustice—the bloody sites of lynchings and massacres and violent uprisings—so I could internalize lessons in radical resistance. “These were freedom fighters,” my mom would whisper. “This is where they were murdered. Remember. You’re a freedom fighter, too.” I didn’t much feel like a freedom fighter, and, given the gruesome, tragic ends that seemed to meet most of my parents’ heroes, I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to become one.

Still, despite all the obvious danger, I knew that my parents would always protect me, no matter what. This was the foundation on which my shaky sense of security was built—that my birth had changed everything. My mother and father always told me that they had stopped taking part in violent “actions” after I was born, that they had committed themselves, for the sake of our family, to a different kind of future. But, like most origin stories, I now know that ours was mostly a myth.

By the late seventies, my family was back in Harlem. My father, as Tony Lee, had taken a job as a teacher at my preschool so he could keep an eye on me. My mother was pregnant again, working at an upscale kids’-clothing boutique on Eighty-first Street called Broadway Baby. As I learned only recently, the job offered an unexpected side benefit: whenever my mom met a customer of a certain type—a woman who was young, white, and pregnant, like her—she would ask for an I.D. to verify a check, and then quickly memorize her personal information. A few days later, a woman would walk into a D.M.V. office and tell the clerk she’d lost her I.D. She would verify her identity with the correct name, birth date, address, and license number, and be issued a replacement on the spot. These I.D.s were then used to rent vehicles that were used in a spree of bank robberies by former members of the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground, fugitive splinter cells determined to keep the revolution alive.

Sometime around 1978 or 1979, my parents took me on my first camping trip, to Alderson, West Virginia. My memories of the trip are vague and impressionistic, mostly based on stories I heard later. But I think of it as a fun few weeks: my first time pitching a tent, cooking on a portable gas-powered stove, lying on a blanket under the stars. Recently, though, as I reconstructed my family’s path through the underground, I noticed something strange about that particular dot in the road atlas: our campsite was right next door to a federal prison, F.P.C. Alderson, which, in 1979, was best known for holding a female inmate named Assata Shakur.

Shakur had been a leading member of the New York Black Panthers, a group that joined my parents underground in the early seventies, rechristened itself the Black Liberation Army, and launched an all-out war against the N.Y.P.D., sparking a series of bloody confrontations in which both police officers and members of the Black underground were killed. Shakur was, like my mom, young, militant, female, and photogenic, and she soon became a political symbol and the focus of a joint F.B.I./N.Y.P.D. manhunt. The N.Y.P.D.’s former deputy commissioner called Shakur “the soul” of the B.L.A., “the mother hen, who kept them together, kept them moving, kept them shooting.”

Shakur was finally arrested in 1973, after a traffic stop turned into a deadly firefight that killed two state troopers, wounded Shakur, and killed her best friend—the man I’m named after—Zayd Malik Shakur. By 1978, when we took our family camping trip to West Virginia, Assata had been locked up for four years, and her friends in the Black underground were desperate to free her.

When I pointed out to my father the “coincidence” of our camping location, he finally admitted—though their involvement isn’t publicly known—that they had been recruited to case the prison. “We took a lot of pictures,” he told me. “Drawing maps and trying to figure out if there was a way to get Assata out. There was a sense that a couple of young white people with a baby could do anything without attracting any attention.”

The maps were never used, because Shakur was transferred from West Virginia to a prison in New Jersey. That fall, an old friend reached out to my father through the underground communications network, dialling a number printed on a faded piece of plastic Dymo tape and speaking to him from a public phone booth. A few days later, my dad watched from a high rock outcropping as the man walked a trajectory through Central Park. Finally, they fell in step on the bridle path around the reservoir, and the man got down to business: the Black Liberation Army had a job for Bill to do—something illegal, and potentially dangerous. “I remember weighing it with Bernardine very heavily,” my dad told me, when I asked him about the choice he made that day. “I didn’t really want to do it on some level. But, on another level, I wanted nothing more than to do it.”

“You were a father,” I reminded him. “Didn’t you think about that? About the risks you were taking?”

“Well, it’s like everything else about being involved in the movement,” he said. “On the one hand, like every other human being, the speck of the universe you understand best is your life. So, you want to have that. On the other hand, if you’re a person who’s made a commitment to something larger, you want that larger thing to work also. And so it’s never quite left me—this contradiction. How do you take responsibility for yourself and your family, and at the same time take some responsibility for the larger world?”

A few weeks later, my dad called in sick to work at my preschool. He left me at home with my mom, who was now seven months pregnant with my brother, and caught the 1/9 train to a parking garage downtown. There, he found a van waiting for him. The key was under the mat. A garage ticket was tucked into the visor. An hour later, he parked the van outside a Laneco department store in a strip mall in New Jersey and settled down to wait.

A few miles away, the B.L.A. paramilitary leader Sekou Odinga arrived at the prison. He handed over an I.D., signed the visitors’ log with a fake name, and was taken in to see Shakur. They embraced, and, under cover of the hug, Odinga passed her a .357 Magnum revolver. The pair quickly took a prison matron hostage. Within minutes, two more armed B.L.A. soldiers arrived, handcuffed a guard at gunpoint, and, with Shakur, piled into a hijacked van, drove out through the gates of the prison without firing a shot, and scattered into waiting getaway cars driven by white friends from the underground.

A few miles away, my dad’s B.L.A. contact knocked on his window, loaded something or someone into the back of his van, and told him to drive. My father still isn’t sure what he was carrying; he doesn’t think it was Shakur herself, but the underground had to disperse a wide range of people and equipment that day—guns and fugitives and members of the support network. “One of the things about an action like that,” he told me, “is the elaborateness of it means that you can play a very small role in a small corner, not even fully understanding what the larger piece is.”

But as he pulled the van onto a road in New Jersey, heading toward Manhattan, he started to feel nervous. “I had my hands on the wheel at two and ten,” he remembered. “I was trying to look as normal as I could possibly look.” Then he saw a roadblock ahead, a state trooper waving half the cars over for a search. “They were onto it,” he told me. “It was really terrifying. But, of course, the whole point of me driving the van is I’m a young white guy driving a van, and they’re not looking for that.” He held his breath, hoping the white edge would hold. “He looked right at me. And I . . . just went by. I remember, very clearly, being absolutely giddy once I passed that cop. I made it! I got through! I had survived!” He parked the van, left the key and the parking ticket, called in its location, and came back home.

In 1984, Shakur surfaced in Havana, where she was granted political asylum by Fidel Castro’s leftist government. She lived in Cuba for decades, giving talks and writing her autobiography, and became a global symbol of Black liberation—what she called a “maroon,” or escaped slave. Shakur died last year, having inspired generations of Black writers and activists, hip-hop artists like Nas and Mos Def, and the character of the militant Perfidia Beverly Hills, played by Teyana Taylor, in the film “One Battle After Another.”

But for me the story of Shakur’s jailbreak was not just a piece of radical political history but a surprising revelation about my own family. Because, though I had always understood, growing up, that my parents were willing to sacrifice their friends, their freedom, and even their lives for their cause, it had somehow never occurred to me that they were willing to sacrifice my brother and me, too.

“Did you really think about what would happen if you were caught?” I asked my father, recently.

He’s eighty-one now, with glasses and wisps of white hair sticking out from under his baseball cap. “Yeah,” he said. “I thought my life would end.”

“So why?”

“Because it mattered,” he said. “Because the world needed it to happen.”

Assata Shakur leaves a New Jersey courthouse in 1977.Photograph from AP

Shakur’s escape turned out to be the final successful action of the revolutionary undergrounds of the nineteen-seventies. Two months later, in early 1980, my brother Malik was born, and my parents decided to turn themselves in. Our flophouse in Harlem was growing crowded. Not with possessions—Malik’s crib, like mine, was a dresser drawer lined with blankets. But, just as some parents realize after their second kid that they’re going to need a larger place, or a minivan, my mother decided that a family of four was just too big for the underground life style. “I felt like we hadn’t hurt you too much by having you be a fugitive,” she told me. (I didn’t agree, exactly, but I let it slide.) “Two kids was another thing. And you were getting older. The world had moved on.”

So, that December, my parents woke me up in the middle of the night for our last cross-country drive through the underground. In a courthouse in Chicago, surrounded by police and microphones, my mother read a brief statement, making it clear that surrendering didn’t mean she was giving up. “I regret not at all our efforts to side with the forces of liberation,” she told the judge. “I remain committed to the struggle ahead.” She pleaded guilty to bail-jumping and to aggravated battery, misdemeanors left over from the Days of Rage riots, ten years earlier, when a cop had tried to grab her and she’d kicked him in the balls. She paid a fifteen-hundred-dollar fine and was released that same day, with three years of probation.

It still amazes me that a former most-wanted fugitive could escape with a slap on the wrist. But my mom had been underground for a long time; most of the charges against her had been dropped due to F.B.I. misconduct exposed in the COINTELPRO scandal—warrantless wiretapping, break-ins, burglaries, and blackmail attempts. The government had its own crimes to cover up. And, by 1981, the sixties must have felt like ancient history; Ronald Reagan was about to be sworn in as President, elected on a promise to “make America great again.” Most of the country seemed ready to move on.

As it turned out, my parents got out just in time. Later that year, some former members of the Weather Underground and the B.L.A. tried to hold up a Brink’s armored car in upstate New York; it turned into a deadly firefight, with the robbers shooting a guard and two police officers. This was a moral and political catastrophe for the movement; it led to dozens of arrests, and the end of the last fragments of the underground. My parents’ friends David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin had driven a getaway truck in that robbery. Both were sentenced to decades behind bars. They left behind their infant son, Chesa, telling the babysitter they’d be back soon, and simply never came home.

My parents adopted Chesa when he was just eighteen months old. He became a part of our family, my second brother, and a living reminder, for me, of how easily I could have lost my mother and father the way Chesa lost his. “I was still breast-feeding when they were arrested,” he told me, recently. “Later, I would say to them, ‘Why did you both have to go? . . . It only takes one person to drive a car.’ ”

Years passed. My brothers and I grew up. We went to high school. We played Little League. There were sometimes flashes from our fugitive past: a clicking sound on the phone that could be (or was I being paranoid?) an F.B.I. wiretap; letters from Canada or Cuba arriving without postmarks. But by the time we were teen-agers my parents had regular middle-class jobs, and our family had a fairly typical American life. Our story faded from the news. Most people we met had never heard of the Weather Underground. When our friends or neighbors discovered our family’s past, their reaction was usually disbelieving or mildly titillated, as if they’d found out a parent in the P.T.A. had once been a porn star.

After years of struggle and therapy, Chesa became a straight-A student, a Rhodes Scholar, and went on to Yale Law School. He eventually became the district attorney of San Francisco, part of a wave of progressive prosecutors elected during the racial reckoning over George Floyd’s killing. He was later recalled—part of the backlash to that moment—and now runs a legal advocacy center at U.C. Berkeley’s law school, working to reform the criminal-justice system from within.

Assata Shakur also left behind a child—her five-year-old daughter, Kakuya—who is now a social worker in Chicago, with her own family. She last saw her mother more than twenty years ago. “I think about that a lot,” Kakuya told me, before her mother’s death, “that she remembers me as a fifteen-year-old. Like, wow, my mother really doesn’t know who I am as a woman. She doesn’t know my children.” Kakuya told me she still admires her mother’s radical commitment but also feels a sense of loss and regret about the costs of her mother’s struggle. “Why would you have a child?” she asked, rhetorically. “Why did you do that when you knew you couldn’t raise me?”

All of us kids who grew up in the underground know that feeling—of being unwilling casualties of our parents’ war. None of us decided to follow in our parents’ violent footsteps. Most dedicated our lives to raising families, and to a more incremental, peaceful type of change. Our parents—our childhood heroes—turned out to be flawed human beings who never quite lived up to their own revolutionary ideals, and we all had to live with the knowledge that their radical choices had costs not just for us but for the other families who were hurt, the other kids who had to grow up without their parents.

I’ve spent years trying to untangle what I admire about my mother and father—their sacrifice and commitment, their radical solidarity with the Black freedom movement—from the violence and factionalism that often undermined their cause. That contradiction may be why I became a writer instead of a revolutionary—because I never quite felt their black-and-white moral certainty about what comes next, or their radical instinct to blow things up in an effort to change the world.

But I’ve been thinking a lot lately, in this new era of racial reckoning, police violence, and rising authoritarianism, about what the future will look like for our children. My wife and I have two daughters of our own, and I think often about how to explain to them their family story. Of course, our girls don’t need to learn to recognize undercover cops or walk a trajectory—not yet—but I still wonder what parts of their revolutionary legacy they might find useful, either as inspiration or as cautionary tale. Because this is the funny thing about inheritance: It starts as something you receive, maybe reluctantly, from your past. But it becomes something you have to decide how to pass on to the future.

Recently, I sat down with my mother in her living room, in Hyde Park on the South Side of Chicago. She’s eighty-four now, with silver in her hair and a network of fine wrinkles across her skin. But her green eyes are still intense as always, watching me.

“You know, it’s funny,” she told me. “You’ll see when you’re this old—I hope you get to be this old. I think about my parents more now than I have for years and years. My dad cut himself off from his family for so long.” Her father, Bernard, had run away from his own parents at fourteen to chase his version of the American Dream. “It was ironic when I kind of replicated that pattern,” she said. “Went on the run. Although it’s a very American, immigrant pattern, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” I started. “I’m not sure. . . . Nobody else in our family ever became a revolutionary, or a federal fugitive.”

She suddenly smiled, looking straight at me.

“Your kids might,” she said. “You never know.” ♦

This is drawn from “Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground.”